Biden vs. Ryan

Biden clearly dominated much of the debate, and part of that was simply a function of his greater aggressiveness. He frequently interrupted and corrected Ryan, who at times seemed flummoxed and at a loss for how to respond. Ryan predicted before the debate that Biden was going to come at him like a “cannonball,” and he was right. Unfortunately for Ryan, knowing this didn’t seem to do him much good. The cannonball hit him, and he didn’t score very many hits of his own in response.

As in the presidential debate, a generally poor job by the moderator made this possible. Once again, the candidate with the weaker debating skills was often overwhelmed by his more confident opponent. The moderator’s failure was offset somewhat by her better, more pointed questions. Even so, the debate sometimes devolved into little more than a shouting match. Overall, Raddatz did a poorer job than Lehrer. The only thing that was improved over last week was the quality of the questions.

On the fiscal and domestic policy issues that Ryan was most comfortable talking about, he was at his most effective, but even here he made a number of mistakes or failed attacks. He didn’t have much of a response when he was called out for his requests for stimulus funding and his attempt to use the unemployment rate in Biden’s hometown against him flopped. He had to fall back on the GOP ticket’s Medicare demagoguery when challenged on his ticket’s proposal for Medicare reform, and he fell into the trap of talking about Social Security privatization. There were also some missed opportunities for Ryan. When Biden defended the HHS mandate, Ryan didn’t challenge him on his presentation of it, and left unanswered Biden’s shots at his commitment to Catholic social teaching.

It was on foreign policy where Ryan was most obviously outmatched, as I assumed he would be. Especially in the sections of the debate on Afghanistan and Syria, Ryan was stuck defending Romney’s very similar positions on both while trying to argue against administration policy. It wasn’t an enviable task, and Ryan was limited by what he had to work with, but it doesn’t change the fact that Ryan didn’t inspire much confidence that he is prepared to be president if the need arose. It’s not surprising that Ryan didn’t do very well in these sections. He isn’t “fluent” on foreign policy, and that should have been obvious all along. Ryan’s boosters did him a great disservice by pretending that he was.

Ryan’s limited experience on foreign policy was on display all night. Perhaps the most painful moments were when he attacked the administration’s response to the Green movement. This was the clearest example of Ryan’s reliance on standard movement conservative talking points on foreign policy for the entire debate, and it was clear that he thought that everyone was supposed to find this damning so that all he had to do was mention it. For almost all voters, Ryan’s lack of experience and preparation won’t matter, but he did nothing to reassure worried voters that a Romney administration would not keep U.S. forces in Afghanistan well into the future or that it wouldn’t pursue a more aggressive policy in Syria.

Biden largely ignored the first question he was asked about intelligence regarding the consulate attack, and used it as a springboard to recite the usual list of administration foreign policy decisions that they want to celebrate. Despite some resistance from Ryan, Biden was able to skate through the debate without facing much criticism on the handling of the consulate attack and its aftermath. As usual, the Libyan intervention and its effects received no attention, and it’s not as if Ryan was going to bring them up. Biden emphasized U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014, which created the misleading impression that there would be no U.S. forces in the country beyond that date. That isn’t correct, but Ryan didn’t challenge him on this, which allowed him to say it several times without being contradicted. Biden exaggerated the extent of U.S. support for the Syrian opposition, which has been relatively minimal and indirect. He kept pushing the idea that a Romney administration would get the U.S. into a new war. Despite Ryan’s denials on this point, they weren’t terribly convincing. That remains a problem for the Republican ticket.

The most disappointing thing about the foreign policy sections of the debate was how fixated on the Near East the questioning was. There was a brief reference to the “reset,” but Ryan attacked it only indirectly and Biden didn’t make much effort to defend it. U.S. policies in most other parts of the world went completely unmentioned, and someone watching one of these debates for the first time could be forgiven if he concluded that U.S. foreign policy concerned no more than three or four other countries.

The GOP has caricatured Biden as a gaffe prone blowhard for so long that they forgot how terrifically effective he can be. Many on the right seem traumatized my his grinning and mugging, but that was exactly what the Democratic base needed since they were all wetting themselves after Obama’s experiment with somnambulism.

I’m a little puzzled how you separate moderation and questions asked as the two seem to go hand in hand. I guess I would agree with you that moderation in this debate was worse in the sense that interruption was allowed, but overall I thought Raddatz was substantially better than Lehrer for questions shes asked and follow ups, which are much more important than moderating interruption in my opinion. This produced a much more substantial debate on policies than the first so I’m honestly pretty shocked at your opinion on the moderation. I found Biden pretty rude, but I probably would’ve done the same to someone like Ryan that spouted half-truths and invented differences between the two when useful yet played to similarity afterwards.

What a pair! Even allowing for the fact that the addition of what might politely be called entertainment value has long been a function of the Vice-Presidency. More profoundly, it has long been said that American Catholics were “Protestants who went to Mass”. But Biden is a secular liberal who goes to Mass, while Ryan is an Ayn Rand devotee who goes to Mass.

While it gives even less pleasure than to come down on the side of either of this year’s candidates for the top job, Biden does at least have the advantage that he has already been doing the job of Vice-President for four years, that he might conceivably be a Presidential nominee in his own right (unlike a 42-year-old member of the House of Representatives), and that he does not imagine “our allies in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar” to be the appropriate arbiters between “Al-Qaeda” and anyone else at all, still less between that and some mythical “Free Syrian Army” which is allegedly in favor of Jeffersonian democracy and of Coca Cola.

Neither of these men has any real interest in reducing abortion. But at least the pursuit of Biden’s favored economic and healthcare policies would not actually increase it, unlike Ryan’s, and might even reduce it, like the Christian and Social Democracy of Continental Europe which together make possible 12-week limits or outright bans, or like Britain for a generation after the Attlee Government when abortion remained illegal.

Roll on 2016, when a heavy enough defeat for Romney-Ryan this year ought to have ensured that none of the present quartet will be a candidate for either office.

@ Jetan: Yes, the sudden explosion of the Biden caricature thing is something that has really struck me in the last several months. It’s very baffling how Biden’s habit of impolitic off-the-cuff remarks (many of which are at least accurate) became “Joe Biden is inhumanly stupid and incompetent” among rank-and-file Republicans. It really makes no sense from any sort of objective viewpoint. Biden isn’t brilliant, but anyone who’s followed politics for the last 30 years should know that (a) Biden isn’t stupid and (b) the exact habit that he gets mocked for also leads him to get in really sharp blows against his opponents on occasion.

I don’t care for the Republican foreign policy lunacy or for their kowtowing to Wall Street any more than Mr. Larison, but Biden is an insufferable bore and exemplary political hack.

He is also a serial plagiarist and liar who used to claim that his family were coal miners, until it became clear that he had stolen his life story from a Welsh politician. In the debate, Biden kept referring to his old mother and father, though he’s lied so often about his background that I doubt that he actually knows who they really are.

As soon as Biden threw out the Kennedy reference, I assumed that Ryan would respond by pointing out that, like most of Biden’s schtick, it was stolen from someone else. Alas, Ryan did nothing.

That said, it remains to be seen whether independents were as impressed as partisan Dems by Biden’s booze-addled (seemingly) blow-up.

It isn’t just Republicans that believe Biden is an oaf with little good sense…Obama stuck him in a hole soon after election, once it became apparent he wouldn’t shut up. No doubt Obama wishes he could mulligan that whole thing, but maybe after yesterday he’ll get some more love from the administration. It’s not as if Vice President is at all an important position.

I only saw the last 20 minutes or so. Ryan said that foreign intervention should only be done when it is in the interest of the US. Great, so what on Earth do the internal affairs of Syria have to do with US interest? I wonder if most people watching were like me, asking themselves why anyone gives a crap about Syria. On the other hand, his demurral about humanitarian intervention made me think he might have more sense than the average Republican candidate.

But then you had the abortion question, where Ryan just demolished Biden. There wasn’t much Biden could do, since his position is absolutely retarded. You’d think that after 40 years pro-aborts could come up with something a little less incoherent. Ryan’s qualification on rape/incest/life-of-mother was less convincing, but then again it also suffers from incoherence.

Biden got a good line in, that Ryan ‘voted to put two wars on the credit card’. It was a good jab, but I couldn’t help but think that maybe the Democrats shouldn’t be mentioning the “national credit card” at this point.

There were also some missed opportunities for Ryan. When Biden defended the HHS mandate, Ryan didn’t challenge him on his presentation of it, and left unanswered Biden’s shots at his commitment to Catholic social teaching.

These missed opportunities mainly came from running out of time. Biden also just blatantly lied about the HHS thing, probably knowing that there was no way Ryan could counter.

They polled 381 people. Take that for what it is. That is fewer people than are in one train pulling into Chicago’s Union Station during rush hour, which probably has a more accurate makeup of the population as a whole.

Republicans can use whatever rationalization they want but Ryan gave the Obama campaign enough ammunition to run attack ads from now until 2016. If you watched Biden grinned every time Ryan gave him an opening, and Ryan gave him a lot of openings. Ryan on the other hand barely laid a glove on Biden. The whole thing looked like the president of the student council trying to debate the principal.

It was pretty much a draw, as far as I was concerned. Considering it was his first major debate on a national stage, you have to concede that Ryan performed reasonably well, but I saw little evidence of the wonderkind who supposedly sends tingles up the legs of right-wing conservatives. On the other hand, I believe you give too much credit to Biden re the first question on the Bengazi attack. Biden basically lied and threw the intelligence community under the bus. For a different perspective on Biden’s Bengazi responses, see http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/10/11/biden_contradicts_state_department_on_benghazi_security BTW I find it interesting that the first question in the V-P debate involved the Bengazi attack and that issue was not covered at all in the edited 6-minute segment in which you particpated the other day on NPR’s Morning Edition (editing for which you bear no responsibility). You also fail to mention the rather bizarre facial expressions and laughter Biden exhibited while Ryan was answering questions. It appeared that Biden was trying to channel Al Gore.

I also differ somewhat on your evaluation of Martha Radatz and your continued criticism of Jim Lehrer. I thought we got too much of Radatz’s views on various issues. Americans weren’t watching the debate to find out what Martha Radatz’s views were but to find out what the two V-P candidates thought. In my opinion, Jim Lehrer performed admirably by keeping out of the frst debate as much as possible and letting the Romney and Obama battle it out. I have no idea what Lehrer’s politics are, but I have been watching him on PBS since the 70’s when the McNeil-Lehrer Report was only a half-hour long and devoted to a single topic. I have ben a fan since watching the first show. He has always impressed me as being a pretty fair journalist who for the most part managed to mask his own personal politics (even though there were a couple of instances during the first debate when he inapropriately sought to supplement Obama’s response).

Biden was a boor. He won the battle controlling the agenda for the night. He lost the war with his unprofessional behavior. I think at least trying to act professionally is a requisite for being US VP.

Every policy point that was under discussion last night was obscured by the vice -President’s intemperate behavior. It was truly bizarre – his persona kept inflating until it filled the screen like a parade float of the Joker.
As McLuhan pointed out years ago, the medium is the message in the age of TV. The wonks may bat around what was said last night for a few days but the lasting impression for most people concerned with our foreign misadventures will be that neither Biden nor Ryan can be trusted on foreign policy, Ryan on substance, Biden because he has the temperament of an overbearing lunatic which, if anything, is worse. You can’t reason with a lunatic.

Matt, Biden said he stands with his church’s view on Abortion, but that he did not think he or anyone else should impose their views on anybody. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Why does it bother you so much when somebody says they don’t want to get into your buisness, especally the government?

Ryan was supposed to tap dance all over the “gaffetastic” Biden according to the GOP mainstream. Instead the biggest gaffe was sheepish Ryan admitting that he’d taken stimulus money because “that’s what we do.”

I watched about 2 mins, during which Biden was smirking and chuckling while Ryan was answering a question directly put to him by the moderator. He clearly is an idiot savant that can be trained to stick to talking points, but that’s about it.

Inside the cocoon, the response is that Ryan schooled Biden on everything. I thought Ryan got good shots to repeat the same sloganesque platitudes and was able to be even in some areas but I agree that on foreign policy he was owned by Biden. Inside the cocoon, where it’s still the 80s, Ryan said everything to please the neocon hawks.

@Melissa – I don’t believe that I said anything about the content of Rep. Ryan’s statements (or VP Biden’s, either), and I don’t think that you have any idea what I am “OK with”. Please don’t attribute to me positions that I have not taken.

Biden’s body language was often infuriating–sanctimonious and self-righteous and filled with a hallelujah chorus of liberal self-congratulation. In contrast, Ryan didn’t look like he regarded serious political disagreement as a comic spectacle. Biden is a buffoon as well as a boor.

Far too many liberals are poseurs when it comes to reasonable disagreement. They talk the talk of civility and “agreeing to disagree,” but when do they walk the walk? The insularity of liberalism is stupefying.

I can’t understand where all this Biden-was-inappropriately-aggressive and Ryan was the-picture-of-polite assessment comes from. In the debate I watched, Ryan hogged the time, droning on and on in his answers–which the moderator allowed, and he repeatedly interrupted Biden, sometimes to the point of shouting. He may not have been chuckling but he often grinned smugly. They were both rather obnoxious, but at least Biden seemed to have some command of the facts as opposed to the fantasies harbored “inside the cocoon.”

M_Young says: “Liberals impose their views on others all the time. Think of anti-discrimination law, for example, which tells property owners who they must rent to, restaurant owners who they must serve, etc.”

There is a moral calculus to public policy as there is to anything else. My mother considers abortion murder but is not willing to impose that view on other people. She also considers killing an infant to be murder and is willing to see that view imposed on others.

Similar moral calculus gets played out in war (drones that kill civilians along with their targets is or is not acceptable), with animals (from slaughtering practices to medical or consumer experimentation) and as regards personal property, especially when said property offers public services or accomodations.

For example, while I think that restaurants and housing are public accomodations that should not be allowed to discriminate, private clubs are another matter. I therefore opposed all of those lawsuits that Gloria Allred brought against private gentleman’s clubs, even if I thought the clubs should have allowed women to join, and even if I could support pressuring those clubs (or Augusta) to end their discriminatory practices.

And,of course, conservatives have no problem with imposing their views on others, either. Heck, neither do libertarians when it comes to economic policies.

“Biden said he stands with his church’s view on Abortion, but that he did not think he or anyone else should impose their views on anybody.” The Obama administration are imposing their views on contraception on insurance companies and the catholic church.

I felt ryan stood his ground. He didn’t land any significant punchs but he wasn’t k.o.’d by biden either. Of course none of this matters if the President bombs in his 2nd debate like he did in the 1st one.

For what it is worth, CBS had a poll of “uncommitted” voters that thought Biden had won by 50% to 36%.

After watching most of the debate (switching back and forth with the baseball game), i tend to view the thing as a draw. Biden was Biden, and Ryan was like a petulant child who had memorized all of the answers for a test. He managed to say everything the way he memorized it, but seemed unable to “freewheel”, which why he can caught up in Biden being Biden a few times.

OH, on fiscal policy to me Ryan is a loser. Who is willing to go with a politician who says: I have a plan to fix everything, but I’ll let you know the details later. He might as well be telling us, I have a plan, now bend over while I demonstrate!

“M_Young…still angry that restaurants have to serve Black people? Unbelievable.”

So killing an individual human being, a individual human being who in 99% of the time came into being because of your own actions, is less blameworthy than simply refusing to serve a black guy on one’s own property?

“And,of course, conservatives have no problem with imposing their views on others, either. Heck, neither do libertarians when it comes to economic policies.”

Exactly, except that conservatives in general don’t pretend they aren’t.

Biden’s position is basically my position. While I dislike abortion, I am not about to dictate to women who I will most likely never meet and certainly will never completely understand their situations. If a friend or family member came to me for advice, I would tell her that she should choose life, and I would be there for her, but that if she still chose to have an abortion I would support her decision because it is her body.

Biden’s command of Middle Eastern politics was very impressive, especially when he noted that Syria was “geographically” five times larger than Libya, explaining the reason his or Obama/s administration had not intervened there. His full statement was that Syria “is a different country, it is five times as large geographically, it has one fifth the population.” Even flipped, it’s still wrong. Syria is about 71,500 sq. miles and Libya is is nearly 680,000. That’s almost ten times bigger. Moreover, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a pol say, “Look, democracy is never going to spring forth within a culture that has been cousin-marrying since before Muhammad’s time. It’s insulting to think that such tribal peoples will ever see our way of life or values as anything but bizarre on the mild end, and dangerous on the far end. Maybe it’s time we leave these people to their own devices.”

Jim Houghton: I agree with you. I don’t care about somebody’s view on abortion, contraception, gay marriage, religion, gun control, etc. These issues should be decided by each person irrespective of courts and politicians.

Biden has been the stalwart standard barer of the democratic party for well over a decade. He has been questioned many dozens of times about democratic policy on the national stage (admittedly he was always swinging at softballs during the Bush neocon administration). His supposed Bidisms are largely a political construct by republicans who continue their inability to offer alternative policy other than for an alternative reality, where personal responsibility translates into blame thy neighbor for thy problems, and if they have trouble doing that, just say it is gods will god willing. After all they were the authors of deficits don’t matter, environmental concerns are personal choices not worthy of policy action, the free market regulates itself to the benefit of all Americans, and my favorite, facts don’t matter since we can create our own reality. Republican mantra reads like an anti-christ manifesto against the golden rule and the ten commandments yet they claim to represent a moral majority while also claiming to be the exclusive party of the righteous. So when I see the republican’s main criticism is of the vice presidents mannerisms, I smell rotten fish and sour grapes and absolutely nothing on substance or actual issues. The article itself is pretty funny as the title admits to Ryan’s inexperience in foreign affairs and then proceeds to try and counter that weakness by applauding republican lying demagoguery concerning medicare and social security. Ryan’s and Romney’s shortcomings are not personal ones, they are profoundly representative of Republican ideology which is bi-polar in the extreme as they wrestle with what their global corporate sponsors want versus what most of the american voting public wants.

While Paul Ryan is in the same camp as the “Bomb, bomb Iran” neoconservatives and chickenhawks, let’s not forget that Joe Biden at one time proposed that Iraq should be broken up into different zones, with Baghdad being an “international Zone” akin to Shanghai during the Late Qing Dynasty/Early Republic of China. Also, Joe Biden was quite keen on calling Serbs (not just Milosevic) “Thugs” and comparing them to Nazis to fuel patriotic fervor. (Not that I like that mass-murdering scum who ordered the death of many Bosnians and Croats, but let’s not be afraid of calling out Biden for his past)